


The Sons of Darkness

by FanficCornerWriter19



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alarkling if you squint, Big Brothers, Depression, Disowning, Gen, I have an OC named Aleksander, I must say this, I'm Bad At Tagging, Insanity, Little Brothers, Sorry Not Sorry, Sort Of, Summoning Darkness, i had to do this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-25 00:26:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16650778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FanficCornerWriter19/pseuds/FanficCornerWriter19
Summary: Decades after the fall of the last Darkling and the first Sun Summoner, the rise of a Shadow Summoner once more draws the eyes of Ravka. Although it's not the Shadow Summoner everyone expects it to be.Here's a hint: it's not King Aleksander.Or: Rule number one (don't interfere) turns out to be very hard to follow.





	The Sons of Darkness

No one knew where they came from. No one knew if they were the respective offspring of the last Darkling and the first Sun Summoner or not. No one knew if they were descendants of the other Sun Summoners, either. Any theories about their origins were pure speculation. However, they _were_ there, the Sun and Shadow Summoners; always full of power and fire, just to the side of the foreground. Only they were rare, incredibly rare, so rare that for a while people wondered that they even still existed.

There had only been two pairs since the deaths of the last Darkling and the first Sun Summoner. One pair became lovers, the other died enemies. So of course when the prince was revealed to be a Shadow Summoner, the whole country waited with bated breath to see what he could and would do.

They were not disappointed.

Prince Aleksander—that's KS, not X, thankyouverymuch—was powerful. passionate… and beloved.

His eyes were a deep blue, almost indigo, and his hair was a platinum blond that was almost white. His heart was enduring and compassionate, reaching out to everyone and anyone. His fingers treated darkness like an extension of himself, as if he were the shadows themselves rather than their master. Early on, he mastered a trick of escaping his lessons by morphing into shadow substance and speeding away, only re-joining the corporeal world when he was safe from his tutors.

And they loved him.

* * *

Aleksander watched over his namesake almost like an anxious father, hovering over him as if waiting for him to commit a mistake. Alina could tell he resented this golden, blue-eyed boy for being loved when he himself had been hated and reviled, even if he didn’t consciously recognize what he felt to be resentment.

But he couldn’t act on his instincts, both to shield the boy against his mistakes and to hate the boy who found it so easy to not make them.

**Rule number one** : don’t interfere.

Alina saw her old friend in this white-haired boy whose heart’s fortitude could carry a thousand sufferings and still not break, whose smile held the healing and whose mind held the understanding it took to be a good ruler. No one was ordinary, and Prince Aleksander knew that. She felt the bizarre urge to protect him, to keep him away from all the evils in the world so that his smile could remain untainted.

Saints knew his namesake had suffered that enough.

Her Aleksander’s smile was rare, and when it did come it was this prince’s smile, if the prince had seen five hundred years of loneliness, ambition, and fear.

When the ten-year-old Prince Aleksander first gazed upon the ruins of a bandit attack on the northern border, an unanticipated one that left only three survivors to tell the tale, Alina ached for him. She itched to step out of the shadows that hid her, if only to comfort the boy whose brave face was as much a mask as any Nikolai had ever put on.

“What will it take to stop all of this?” The ten-year-old’s voice was steady. Aleksander the elder held her hand, never pressuring it, never letting go. Already Aleksander the younger was learning to lie, if only by omission. If only by not saying how much he would’ve liked to throw up.

“Too much,” the king answered. Alina agreed. That day, she learned that the prince’s name was in fact Aleksander Nikolai Lantsov.

* * *

Two years later, Prince Aleksander brought something—someone—new to the gardens. “See, Maximilien,” he said. “This is where you live. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” The light in his eyes hadn’t faded, even though at twelve the prince had already ended a life. Alina had underestimated the endurance of the heart that at first seemed big but fragile, like a castle of glass.

Beside her, Aleksander materialized, having gone off to see the rest of the capital – a sentiment he hadn’t gotten rid of even through the decades. “It’s a child,” he realized. “A baby.”

“His brother,” Alina observed. A twelve-year age gap wasn’t all that strange, in a country like this. Prince Aleksander kept chattering to the infant, his face illuminated with an adoration that was normally reserved for a child. It seemed that with the age gap, Prince Aleksander considered himself a parent, or at least a protector, for young Prince Maximilien.

Prince Maximilien grew as quickly as his older brother, with a crop of dusky gold hair probably stemming from the drops of Fjerdan blood in his veins. His eyes were a clear azure blue, and they followed Prince Aleksander with the admiration and love of a child for his father.

He was adored without suspicion, and for his fierce protectiveness and clever mind his nickname reached even where the pair lived, and both of them wondered at its similarity. It meant _Little Wolf,_ the same way another younger prince’s name had meant _Puppy_ , so long ago. Perhaps it was only the nostalgia, but really.

Aleksander and Alina were there when the four-year-old child tripped and fell from the high basin of the fountain in the garden. He screamed—

— **Rule number one** : don’t interfere—

—and flung out his hands, shrouding himself in the shadow of the fountain and melting away into darkness. Aleksander swore. Alina blinked in surprise.

Maximilien surfaced from the shadow of a bush several feet away, unharmed.

The hidden pair exchanged looks even as Prince Aleksander called his brother by name, sprinting into the garden like a lightning bolt.

Prince Maximilien was a Shadow Summoner. None of the Shadow Summoners before him had been more than distantly related, and the fact that he was the brother of one was unheard of. Alina’s trepidation increased when she saw the worry kindle in Aleksander’s grey eyes. Aleksander was never that worried.

_I suppose there really is a first time for everything_.

Maximilien was even more powerful than his brother, and even more brilliant, although never a match for what Alina had been at seventeen, or for what Aleksander had been in his youth. He had no access to amplifiers, and he wasn’t an amplifier himself. He had no way of augmenting his power.

At six he managed to sear a slash into a rock from the inside, using the same trick Alina had used all those years ago on the mountains. He hadn’t cut it all the way, or even halfway, but Alina caught the flicker of fear in both Aleksanders’ eyes all the same. At nine he was sneaking out at night and trying to find a way to harness his power in order to burn things, just so it wouldn’t have to be so cold in winter for Os Alta.

At ten, he made a dangerous friend.

Alina saw Genya in the auburn-haired girl who climbed over the palace walls at night; Genya’s secret disdain for unfair social convention, and her clever audacity.

Aleksander only saw that the girl wore gloves.

* * *

When King Grigori and Queen Anya died, Prince Aleksander was twenty-three and Prince Maximilien was eleven. Prince Aleksander became King Aleksander, and the prince who remained a prince grew more solemn than an eleven-year-old had any right to be.

**Rule number one** : don’t interfere.

The girl saved him then.

The girl’s name was Mila. She snuck over the walls with a combination of cunning and incredible strength. Aleksander and Alina knew that she could be little more than a lonely street girl whose parents either slept too soundly or cared too little to notice her nightly disappearances. She was small and wiry and lively, a playmate his own age for Maximilien, and he was happier than he had been since Anya and Grigori’s death.

Still, Aleksander the elder was uneasy. She never took off her gloves, and even after the night she allowed Maximilien to hug her goodbye, she never touched him voluntarily. He couldn’t really see, but he also suspected she didn’t let the prince touch any of her bare skin.

He knew what that meant.

Alina saw danger because of the childish love in Maximilien’s eyes. If she was inevitably swallowed by the city like she would be in their teen years, the younger prince would suffer. And when powerful people suffered, those who depended on them suffered also.

* * *

It was the noise that attracted them, at first.

Then it was the fact that it was at the palace.

Then it was—for Alina—Maximilien’s sobbing scream; the most terrible sound a child can make—the sound they make when something they love dearly is being torn from them and they know it to be gone forever. And still, two years after the death of his parents and four years after his first kill, Maximilien was a child. 

Then it was—for Aleksander—the desperate surge of Maximilien’s power, cutting darker than even the night around them.

Then it was the light. Saints, that light! It shone bright and brilliant against the night sky, the peasants gawking in the fields and the merchants staring with wide eyes and stilled hands even as Aleksander and Alina moved as one towards the palace.

Even before they were halfway there, soft brown eyes met brilliant grey and exchanged a look that knew they would be too late.

Light exploded out of the garden walls, revealing the spectacle of two teenagers standing hand-in-hand before of a group of guards, two of whom had fallen and were being tended to by Healers. Both of those hidden in the shadows knew enough to see that the dark pools on the path were pools of blood, and that one guard was screaming silently and the other unconscious from the trauma.

Two separate things lay on the grass, stained with red and starkly bright in the moonlight: an arm, right down to the hand that held Mila’s missing glove, and another hand, the palm of which was burned.

Aleksander took Alina’s hand.

Maximilien’s face was twisted in a rictus of shock, horror, terror, and grief, and the hand that wasn’t gently clasping Mila’s was clenched into a white-knuckled fist, dripping shadows like blood. “Take her away, and I’ll kill you where you stand,” he snarled quietly, a wolf whose den had been desecrated.

Mila looked on the edge of a breakdown; Alina recognized on the girl’s face her own reaction to the attack on Novokribirsk. Yet her fingers twined willingly with Maximilien’s, and in her other hand burned an orb of pure light, so bright one could scarcely look at it without seeing spots. She added her own threat, soft but deadly: “Harm him and you’ll regret it.”

Aleksander made as if to rush forward, but stopped himself. Alina practically vibrated from the strain of holding herself back.

**Rule number one:** don’t interfere.

King Aleksander ran in, an echo of the day Maximilien was discovered to be a Shadow Summoner. He paled very visibly at the sight that met his eyes, his hand jerking out involuntarily as if to snatch his brother and pull him to protection. “Maximka, get away—”

Maximilien slashed once, upward.

* * *

The sentence was death.

* * *

The night before his execution, he disappeared.

The rumours were that the thirteen-year-old boy had been able to resist as many guards as he had years before being finally thrown in a jail cell. No one remembered that he was a prince. No one remembered that his brother was beloved and was still alive, even after being attacked with the Cut. No one remembered that he wasn’t an abomination, an unnatural monster, something that wasn’t meant to be.

Both Aleksanders had a difficult time remembering rule number one. But it was there, like a chain, staying their hands. King Aleksander had a new limp when he paced his room restlessly. His namesake had no such impediment.

**Rule number one** : don’t interfere.

Alina kept reliving the moments before the prince’s capture. Maximilien had raised Mila’s bare hand to his lips and kissed it, like a gentleman at a dance. The girl had whispered back, “ _I’ll find you, Maximka. This Sun Summoner is nothing without her Darkling._ ”

His smile had been bitter. “ ** _Darkling_** _is an outdated term_.”

No one but King Aleksander had ever called Maximilien _Maximka_. And Mila’s parting line pressed on her mind; what had she meant? Was she so foolish in love as to exaggerate? Or—

_This Sun Summoner is nothing without her Darkling._

What if Mila’s ability to summon was indeed only unlocked by Maximilien? What if her only power was as an amplifier until Maximilien lent her his own power, echoing across them? Aleksander had confirmed that Mila could be nothing else but an amplifier: Maximilien couldn’t have used the Cut twice in succession otherwise.

So what, then, was she? What, then, were _they_?

The rumours in the kingdom might have made Aleksander and Alina laugh, had they been in the mood to. Maximilien had gone missing; tongues wagged in his absence and in his brother’s grief. He had been cursed from birth. He _was_ a curse, born to sweep over the Lantsov household. He was the reincarnation of the last Darkling, vengeful and hating. The only one that was true was that he still lived.

In the end, Maximilien found them.

He knew instantly who they were. When he nearly slammed a knife through Aleksander’s leg, he’d looked up from the rabbit he was cutting free of his snare… and bowed.

Maximilien was no longer the Maximilien they knew. He was bitter, weary, and half-insane. The smile that was so like his older brother’s—and so like Nikolai’s, whose descendant he was—curled sardonically, tainted now too.

He woke them up with night terrors almost every night. Alina would go and see what the matter was, because after all these years she still cared as the _otkazat’sya_ did. Aleksander would flip on his face and try not to care that this boy who was so like and so unlike him was near, that this was a chance to give someone the kindness he never knew, except from Alina and that ancestor of Maximilien’s whose memory kept him bonded to the mortal race.

_Little Wolf._ It had haunted him. Maximilien’s nickname was _Little Wolf._

Sometimes it felt like a ghost hovering at their shoulders, on the days when Maximilien particularly reminded them of Nikolai—biting sarcastic wit and charming slippery eloquence. Sometimes it felt like the missing piece of both of them had been returned, just a little changed, to take his place once more. 

If only that were the truth.

Aleksander and Alina should have known that Nikolai was special. That _they_ were special; there were no others like them, and there never would be.

That was why it was so easy for Alina—and so hard for Aleksander—to become fond of Maximilien. 

It was only when Maximilien—terrified out of his senses and still at a place where his greatest weapon, his mind, was against him—threw the Cut at Alina that the former Darkling remembered where this path led. Granted, he only managed to nick Alina, since Mila wasn’t there to amplify his power and he was only slightly older than Aleksander had been the first time he used it, but Aleksander knew what it meant.

And for once, he did care.

Because Maximilien’s eyes burned silvery blue when his emotions flared intensely, and in lights like that, they were perfect mirrors. At his age, Aleksander had had his mother. Maximilien had nobody.

His parents were dead. His brother had disowned him. His best friend had disappeared. His mind was fracturing under the immense pressure he was putting himself under, and he was slipping into a depression besides.

If not for the two people who had loved him even when he hated himself, Aleksander would have died long ago. Inside, if not outside.

His protective instinct, shuttered for so long, flourished.

* * *

For the first time in years, Aleksander Morozova had a row with someone. A real row, complete with screaming and throwing things—well, on the fifteen-year-old’s side, anyway. He knew how to step aside, how to let the boy scream until his throat was raw and his surging emotions were satisfied. He was only relieved that the boy was now expressing himself the only way the young know how.

This was when he learned that Mila wasn't really her name. Aleksander didn't know how it had been brought up, exactly, but it had. Mila, the auburn-haired girl from the garden, was a name-changer—like Eryk, like Maxim, like Ivan, of old. The girl was actually named Alina.

Fate must be having such a cruel laugh at their expense. 

Of course, Maximilien had a nightmare when he at last fell asleep. Aleksander answered, but his charge was already half-asleep by the time he got there, and the boy turned over, muttering, “M’fine, Shura.”

_Shura_ , his mind supplied. _Diminutive of Shurik, which is a nickname of Aleksander_.

Aleksander knew Maximilien wasn’t referring to him. Something curled in his throat all the same. And then Alina was there, by his side. He buried his face in her hair and his hands in hers. Fate was having a field day. The prince who bore his name, the one he watched, turned out to be the calm one after all.

And his brother, the tornado, was the one everybody overlooked because he was the younger prince. Even Aleksander.

He decided not to look into why he felt guilty about that. After all…

**Rule number one** : don’t interfere.

**Author's Note:**

> Edits will be forthcoming, especially concerning Mila.


End file.
